Short Synopsis: The fourth main character turns out to be a detective/psychic who gets hired to find Kanako.
Highlights: Too. Much. Dialogue!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
This episode was an absolute nightmare for an inexperienced raw watcher as myself. During the previous episodes, I still was able to follow the general gist of things due to the visual drawings and stuff, but this episode’s different. For once, it focused on completely different characters (half of them new ones, as if the series hadn’t already enough of them), and nearly the entire episode, save for the few minutes in the beginning, consisted out of talking, talking and more talking.
So, let me see if I got this part correctly: the first part, before the OP, is always a scene from the novel from Sekiguchi? That makes sense in a way: he created his novels based on the boxed head he saw in the train (or was that part of his books as well?), rather than him, being the murderer.
The next scene was the most mind-boggling of all, since none of its characters had appeared in the series before. It centres around a professor called Fukurai Tomokichi and Mifune Chizuko. It seems to be Tomokichi’s duty to find out whether Chizuko is a psychic or not as she claims. At first, this seems to be the case, but the professor wants to do another experiment before believing this. In charge of the contents of the box that need to be guessed is a young guy called Fuji. Somehow he screws up, and lets someone break into his suitcase and take the note out of the box that was supposed to be read. Then something happens with a bit of film that I didn’t pick up, and Fuji somehow humiliates Chizuko in front of the media. This distresses Chizuko so much that she dies of an illness. Now… why would the creators bother showing such a seemingly irrelevant case?
The next scene finally introduces the final main character: Reijiro Enokizu, again a self-proclaimed psychic. There’s one guy, Noriyuki Masuoka who attempts to contact him, I’m not sure whether we’ve seen this guy before in the series, but he seems to be in charge of the case of finding Kanako. There was a lot of random chatter in this part because Reijiro refused to take Masuoka seriously, but the gist seems to be that there is another person looking out for Kanako’s body.
The final part of the episode goes back to Sekiguchi. At this point, I’m still not sure how exactly the guy is involved in the whole case, and how he (and Akihiko for that matter) can become a major characters when they’re primarily novel-writers. This episode shows how he gets visited by his friend Toriguchi, who tell him that Atsuko (apparently, Akihiko has a sister) did a bit of research into the building they ran into in episode 2, and found out that it was a medical research institute. Toriguchi seems to have come to Sekiguchi for a strange rumour he found out, and Sekiguchi introduces Toriguchi to a person who might be of more help than him: Akihiko. Akihiko ends the episode, pretending to be another psychic.
So yeah, this series was already very complex with subs, but it becomes an entire puzzle without them. I hope I got everything right, but a big theme of this episode seemed to be psychics, and whether or not they exist. It’s never confirmed nor denied, but I think that with everything that happened to Kanako, there definitely is some sort of psychic aspect about this series.
How can you rate an episode fairly if you apparently struggled to understand what was going on?
Where did I ever say that my ratings were fair? They’re incredibly biased and all over the place. 😉
Seriously though, the rating was more there for the sake of consistency. Even though I didn’t understand it, I enjoyed it a lot. ^^;
I see, I might have sounded rude but it wasn’t on purpose, I have a tendency of being as straight as an arrow and a little brash. I apologize.
The previous episodes had scenes from a novel by someone named Kubo, who has yet to appear.
This episode’s teaser was from Sekiguchi’s own novel.
The extended history was the story of how research into psychic abilities was discredited; frankly, I don’t know how it survived the adaption, but Enokizu is actually psychic, and talking with the lawyer (who was in episode 2, outside the operating room) he was blurting out several things he saw in the man’s memories.
Akihiko/Kyogokudo is the main character of the series, and his sister is the girl with the hat who was riding with Sekiguchi when they stumbled on the box.
The bit with Prof. Fukurai and Chizuko is fairly well-known in horror circles in Japan. They are partially what The Ring are based on. Could be the series director trying to inject horror fiction references.